Lift: An NFT Movie

Do you remember the NFT craze a few years ago? You couldn’t go on Twitter (sorry, X) without seeing bored apes everywhere. There were claims that this was the next step for online trading, and overnight, there was a stock market of sorts for random images. Fungible tokens that were paid for with currencies that sounded entirely made up. Teenagers on paint, scribbling away, hoping to make their millions. Were they actually going to be worth anything? What is the point of art that anyone can steal by saving the image? Who truly knows what a blockchain is? The answers to these questions never came, but now F. Gary Gray has stepped into the ring with his $100 million Kevin Hart vehicle, Lift, which posits that this may be the next step in the evolution of art - a likely opinion for a film that itself devolves into corporate scammery.

Hart plays Cyrus Whitaker, an art enthusiast turned robber who loves stealing priceless paintings and selling them on the black market for profit. Interpol has been tracking Cyrus and his crew for a long time, led by Abby Gladwell (Guga Mbatha-Raw), who had a fling with the criminal in Paris and is now on his tail as he steals a Van Gogh and an $89 million NFT. When they are caught, Interpol gives them an ultimatum: rot in jail or steal ten tonnes of gold bricks from Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno), who is planning to flood the world’s major cities for profit. This makes very little sense when written down and even less when watching, but the planning stage for this huge heist is undoubtedly the best and only good part of Lift.

Billy Magnussen, as Magnus, is a live wire who rushes around with the energy of a squirrel and is eager to jump at anything that moves. Ursula Corbero plays Camila, a suave pilot who exudes confidence, even when forced into doing aerial manoeuvres Tom Cruise would be scared of. Vincent D’Onofrio shows up as the master of disguise; he’s given very little to do but cough into his mask, pretend to have split personality disorder, and lounge about on a couch. This is a significant problem with the whole film, really: major, top-billed talent in any other movie is sidelined. There is a limit to how much that Sam Worthington, Jean Reno, Burn Gorman, and D’onofrio can do with this tawdry script, especially when the lead is doing his best Dwayne the Rock Johnson impression, smoulder and all.

Cyrus isn’t a character; he’s an amalgamation of the post-argument shower thoughts you get where you say the perfect thing at every moment and look like the coolest person ever to live. Hart sinks under his lines, but there are only a few movie stars on the planet who could make them work. Case in point: the scene where you learn more about what happened in Paris with Agent Gladwell, the two of them with all the chemistry of oil and water, and he has to talk about how he ‘never looked at the blackboard’ because he was too busy ‘looking at the questions that weren’t being asked.’ The ultimate free thinker. Cyrus grooves and smoothly lands on his feet all the way through the mish-mash of uninspired setups of the last hour, smugly getting the girl, winning the day and stealing the gold. All’s well that ends for our perfect, beloved hero and his friends.

Unfortunately, Lift ends up being just another in a set of Netflix’s over-budgeted action thrillers with no personality and zero rewatchability. Red Notice and The Gray Man have set the standard, and Lift has come in and lowered the ante. The man who brought you The Negotiator, Straight Outta Compton and Law Abiding Citizen is nowhere to be seen within these frames, hidden behind a focus so shallow it is impossible to know where the $100 million this movie cost has gone. In a lot of ways, this is an hour and 45 minutes long NFT for Netflix, who are banking on the star appeal of Kevin Hart to upsell something completely worthless. I’d say stay away, but you’ve probably already seen and forgotten it.